At the end of a meeting, a relatively junior level consultant was tasked with documenting the writing on a whiteboard before it was erased. The writing on the whiteboard included a new process flow created by a consulting team that comprised numerous graphical shapes, lines connecting the shapes, and corresponding text. The consultant, using a touchscreen tablet, attempted to hand-draw each of the shapes, the connectors between the shapes, and the corresponding text. Despite the consultant's best efforts, the hand-drawn reproduction was not legible. The line segments forming each of the shapes were uneven, broken, or otherwise unreadable. The connectors were positioned incorrectly. The text was not aligned with the proper shape or connector. The consulting team later reviewed the consultant's reproduction. However, to the team's horror, most of the information created on the whiteboard was not accurately captured using the touchscreen tablet. Members of the team had to painstakingly recreate the new process flow from memory, consuming time that could have been spent on other tasks.
At the end of another meeting, the junior consultant remembered his past mistake and decided instead to take a photo of the whiteboard. While the photo quality was decent, the consulting team could not edit or search the information recorded in the photo. The junior consultant later found himself again painstakingly recreating the information in an editable text version. The same junior consultant was also tasked with recreating other unsearchable/unmodifiable process flows created by the team members. These other process flows had been hand drawn on paper and stored physically or electronically.
Unfortunately, the above incidents reflect a common trend among the increased use of tablets, smartphones, and other computing devices that have cameras and touch-sensitive screens. Oftentimes, users attempt to use the camera to record/scan an image of a figure or use the touchscreen to draw shapes and other objects, even when default shapes are available in a program (e.g., a word processing program). Selecting default shapes is generally time-consuming because each shape has to be properly sized, positioned, colored, etc. Instead, users would rather hand-draw these shapes or photograph the entire figure to save time. However, it is generally difficult for users to draw straight lines, complete shapes, make connections, etc., especially on relatively low friction touch-sensitive devices. The difficulty is further compounded by the size of a user's fingers relative to the size of shapes to be drawn and the accuracy of touchscreen sensors. Moreover, known software applications that record shapes drawn by users may export these shapes to other programs as a static image (e.g., an image with a JPG or PNG extension). These static images, including images recorded by a camera, are not searchable or modifiable.